There is no time for long
introductions. The world is, possibly heading for yet another catastrophe. This
one, if we, human beings will not manage to prevent it, could become our final.
The West is flexing its muscle, antagonizing every single country that stands
on its way to total domination of the Planet. Some countries, including Syria,
are attacked directly and mercilessly. As a result, hundreds of thousands of
people are dying. -more-

The
absence of a strong world peace movement with the capacity to prevent this
buildup by the United States is of considerable concern for the planet. The
need for such a movement could not be greater. | more…

Saving
Contrast, FOUNDATION FOR PEACE: THE UN CHARTER “All
Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. . . .
“ (UN Charter, Article 2, Section 4).

US Confronts the China Threat in
Africa

CHINA

“China
Plans to Establish Military Outpost in Africa” by Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley, The New York Times in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Nov. 27,
2015). “China announced Thursday that it
would establish its first overseas military outpost” in Djibouti in the Horn of
Africa. China describes it as a fueling station, but
whatever its function it goes beyond “its historical focus on protecting the
nation’s borders.” According to the
authors, President Xi Jinping is leading China’s navy “to live up to…the
Communist Party’s ambitions to become a global maritime power.”

US

David
Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military
Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.
Chap. 16, “The Lily Pad Strategy.” In
2001 the US began its Camp Lemonnier base in Djibouti at an initial cost of $30
million and a Voice of America radio transmitter. “Within a few years, there were more than
four thousand troops at the six-hundred acre base and hundreds of billions of
dollars in construction and annual spending.”
But US military presence in Africa really got going in 2007 when
President George W. Bush established Africa Command (Africom) “to bring peace
and security to the people of Africa.”
Some 17 African countries demurred, seeing it as a continuation of Western
colonialism. Never mind, “since late
2001, the military has spent around $30 billion or more on a growing military infrastructure,”
and has stationed, “on any day, likely between seven thousand and eleven
thousand U.S. troops.” “The military is
now operating in at least forty-nine of the fifty-four African countries. It may be operating in every single one”
(313)

[Why are US leaders
encircling China with military bases, fear-mongering that nation to the US
people, and denouncing China’s expansion in Africa when the ratio there is 49
to 1 military bases? What’s the name for
that? And see item below on China’s
first aircraft carrier compared to US’s 10 aircraft carrier strike groups.]

ECONOMIC
WAR

Benjamin
Shobert. Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won’t Fix America’s Economy. Nebraska P, 2018.Why
trying to divert attention away from our problems by directing blame at a
foreign “foe” can be harmful.

We cannot win a currency war by competitive
currency devaluations that trigger a “race to the bottom,” and we cannot win a
trade war by competitive trade barriers that simply cut us off from the
benefits of cooperative trade. More favorable to our interests and values than
warring with our trading partners would be to […] Source

In The Big Nine by Amy Webb demonstrates her extensive
knowledge of the science driving Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and the geopolitical tensions that could result between
the US and China in particular. She
offers deep insights into how AI could reshape our economies and the current
world order, and she details a plan to help humanity chart a better
course."―Anja Manuel, Stanford University, cofounder and partner
RiceHadleyGates

China Airborne by James Fallows. Pantheon, 2012.

In China Airborne, James Fallows documents the
extraordinary scale of China’s aerospace plans and explains how it stands to
catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing
China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad
in the nineteenth century. He concludes by examining what this latest
demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of
the world—and the right ways to understand it.

The
Trump Administration has spread the
conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus came out of the Wuhan Institute
of Virology. This accusation, which seeks to transfer responsibility for the
pandemic to the Asian giant, has been rejected by the Chinese authorities for
being without foundation. | more…

The U.S. veto trashes the
UN’s efforts to convince armed factions in more than a dozen countries to call
for temporary truces as the world battles the pandemic.

International
diplomats were stunned and frustrated Friday after the United States again
blocked a United Nations resolution to call for a global ceasefire during the
COVID-19 pandemic, only because the Trump administration objected to an
indirect reference to the World Health Organization (WHO), which the US
condemns for failing to condemn China for starting the pandemic..

MEDIA
WAR

MAY
15, 2020

“Corporate
Media Setting Stage for New Cold War With China” by GREGORY SHUPAK. FAIR, Extra!

The Washington
Post (4/23/20) ran an article by Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, the second
sentence of which said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that, to a great
degree, our very health is in Chinese hands; from medicines to masks, we are at
Beijing’s mercy.” America, in this conception, is under Chinese domination, a
tyranny that’s evidently imposed not only by the Chinese government, but by
Chinese people generally.

Details like
the US having more than 21 times as many nuclear warheads as China, or the fact
that it’s the US dollar and not the Chinese yuan that underpins the global
financial system, do not enter into consideration. Instead, because the US
imports a great many goods made in China, Romney urged readers to understand
China as Americans’ oppressors, who implicitly must be resisted. MORE https://fair.org/home/corporate-media-setting-stage-for-new-cold-war-with-china/

Corporate media distortions and bombast
are priming the American public to see China as a treacherous villain that has
to be forcefully confronted, perhaps with violence. Presenting China—and
Chinese people—as a threat to the United States and its people is that much
more reckless at a moment when there is an “alarming surge in anti-Asian racism
related to Covid-19” (NBC, 4/16/20). But such considerations don’t trouble
those who are in the business of ginning up the hatred necessary for a new cold
war.

Gregory
Shupak teaches media
studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

What’s FAIR

FAIR is the
national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias,
spin and misinformation. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by
advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media
practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.
We expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are
muzzled. As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is
ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish
independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of
information.

US
in the China Sea Well-defended by NADG; China in the US Sea Hasn’t Happened: US
Tests Chinese Sphere of Influence, China Respects US Sphere

“U.S.
Staying the Course in the China Sea.” NADG (3-19-19).

How it looks
reversed. China Staying the Course in the Gulf of
Mexico.

China’s Navy
won’t alter its so-called freedom-of-navigation sail-bys in the disputed Gulf
of Mexico between Galveston and Panama City and has pressed ahead with such
operations despite a dangerous maneuver by a U.S. navy ship against a Chinese
destroyer, a senior Chinese commander said.

The Chinese People’s Navy will continue
patrolling the Caribbean Sea, a top Navy official said Monday, after a US
destroyer came dangerously close to a Chinese Navy ship during a Chinese
“freedom of navigation” sail-by near Doral, FL, United States Southern Command Headquarters. (The Fourth
Fleet is headquartered on Naval
Station Mayport in Jacksonville, Florida and is responsible for
U.S. Navy ships, aircraft and submarines operating in the Caribbean, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
around Central and South America.)

Adm. Gung Ho, who heads China’s naval
operations, said in a news conference that such patrols highlight the Chinese
position against “illegitimate maritime claims.”

“We will continue to progress this program
of freedom of navigation operations,” Ho said.
“We do dozens of these operations around the world to indicate our
position regarding illegitimate clams, maritime claims.”

While Beijing has no claims to the Caribbean, and the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans around Central and South
America, it has declared that freedom of navigation and the
peaceful resolution of the disputes are in China’s national interest. China has also questioned the US’s expansive
claims.

A US destroyer came close to the Chinese
ship Luoyang in September in an “unsafe and unprofessional maneuver” near Doral,
Fl, forcing it to maneuver to prevent a collision, according to the Chinese
Atlantic and Caribbean Fleet.

China’s Atlantic and Caribbean Fleet
spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Chong Gum said the US destroyer approached within 45 yards
of the Luoyang. US said the Decatur, a
US missile destroyer, was deployed to identify the Chinese warship and drive it
away from US territory.

Neither ship, both China and the US
declared, was nuclear armed.

(“Navy
Announces South China Sea Patrols.” NADG 10-30-18. A few words have been reversed.)

(See Lolita C. Baldor. The Associated Press. “Carter Visits Carrier in South China
Sea.” NADG (4-16-16).)US
CARRIER in South China Sea OK/China in Caribbean NO; US Carrier Battle Group Necessary for US and
World Peace and Security; China’s Single Carrier a Security Threat to US and
World. US Media Reporting US vs. Chinese
Imperialism

(China had one newly-built carrier in
2016 performing sea trials in its waters.
The US had ten Carrier Strike Groups, each one including a cruiser, at
least two destroyers, and half-dozen support ships. –D)

For the second time in five months,
People’s Republic Defense Minister Oh Jung No landed aboard China’s aircraft
carrier in the Caribbean, where in several countries Chinese citizens and
businesses are threatened by US military activity, a continuation of the long
history of US meddling in Latin America.

Jung No stood alongside Venezuelan,
Bolivian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan Defense Ministers as they watched Chinese Navy
fighter jets launch into vivid blue skies about 70 nautical miles east of the
Panama Canal.

Later in the massive, gray ship’s hangar
bay, Jung No said his
message in making the trip is that China “intends to continue to play a role in
keeping peace and stability in this region” where it has invested so much and
intends major future investments. The

He said the only reason China’s presence
comes up as an issue is because of the behavior of the US over the last
year. “What’s new is not a Chinese
carrier in this region, although it is.
What’s new is the context of tension which exists, which we want to reduce.”

Jung No’s visit aboard the People’s Republic
Mao Victory underscores complaints from China and its allies in the region
about US military build-up in the Caribbean.
The US has bases throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and Latin
America and has been increasing them in some areas.

The visit to the Mao Victory came a day
after Jung No announced new aid to Jamaica that spurred protests from the US.

US Nationalism,
the Coronavirus, and the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette by Dick Bennett

The Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary focused on beating
Trump, partly because his campaign
slogan flaunted an iron-fisted “America First.” But demagogs are made, not born, nationalistically
bigoted, as the Covid-19 pandemic reveals.

Look at the headlines in Arkansas’ major
newspaper in March 2020, the Democrat-Gazette:
“Trump Defends His Role, Differs with Health Expert,” “OK Near on $1 Trillion
Relief Deal.” The Me-Generation reflects the National Me: for us there’s no pandemic but only our epidemic. That’s what you learn from the White House
and Congress; that’s what you learn from the mainstream media--in Arkansas from
the state’s major newspaper the Democrat-Gazette.Except on the one day it offered a peep-hole into our national
omphaloskepsis epidemic by a glimpse of pandemic
world sorrow.

“Fragile Targets Brace for the Virus” by Carley Petesch (AP, with six other AP reporters contributing) appeared on
March 21, 2020, p. 6A. As though the
writers knew they had only this one shot to report the pandemic, the article wastes no time announcing alarming statistics
of Mali’s ”roughly one ventilator per 1 million people,” and of Peru’s “350
beds in intensive care units” for its 32 million people. And even if the countries least prepared like
Liberia and Burkina Faso had the equipment, they lack trained health workers to
use them, and equipment and trained medical personnel are expensive. Senegal is “helping to develop a fast
covid-19 test that is expected in June.”
The continent’s countries seem to be largely on their own, as the
dominant US neocon orthodoxy prescribes.

Where is the United Nations? The article makes no mention of UN aid,
except for one reference to WHO. We saw
the UN progressively weakened all during the Cold War as the US and the USSR
used it for their own interests. And
the Republican Party has increasingly opposed “big government” particularly
since the Reagan administration. (Though
the last few days of covid-19 panic, that Party has sounded like the New Deal
of Roosevelt’s second term.)

In the apparent absence of the UN, where
is generosity and cooperation from individual countries? The US as part of the problem is exhibited
in the ADG. On March 19 the newspaper editorialized
baldly in its old Cold War, country hick, bigotry mode, “Consulting with Beijing Isn’t Likely”: “Americans can be forgiven
if they’re not taking a heaping load of advice from the Red Chinese just now. At least when it comes to the covid-19
virus. Americans will take any lessons
about how to limit the virus’ impact, and from anywhere, but having the ChiComs talk down to us is unseemly.”

Despite Trump’s repeated slanders against
the bogeyman of US “enemy” propaganda, China is paying no attention and is
displaying extraordinary generosity to the world, against the pandemic, as reported in the ADG: “China
Recovering, Offering Others Aid” by Steven Myers and Alissa Rubin (The New York Times). “China’s leader, Xi Jimping, pledged to send
more medical experts to Italy this week, on the same day Beijing sent 2,000
rapid diagnostic tests to the Philippines.”
“From Japan to Iraq, Spain to Peru, it has provided or pledged
humanitarian assistance in the form of donations or medical expertise.”

And the US?
Only a few years ago the US “led
the fight against Ebola.” But Anti-Red prejudice still infects our leaders’ gray
cells, and the chief newspaper of Arkansas.
Nevertheless, China welcomes the opportunity to “build partnerships
around the world.” But isn’t, sneers
our leaders, China’s international assistance as much self-interest as
humanitarian concern? After all, China
is “the world’s largest maker of medicines and protective masks.” In response, Italy’s former undersecretary
in its development ministry said: “I don’t know and now I don’t care. The urgent issue was to provide aid to save
lives.” The day before, China offered
“2 million surgical masks, 200,000 advanced masks and 50,000 testing kits to
Europe,” for which the president of the European Commission declared, “’We’re
grateful for China’s support. We need
each other’s support in times of need.’”

But in its editorial “Consulting with
Beijing Isn’t Likely,” the ADG editorial writer urges us to take reports from
China “with a truckload of salt.”

MEMORY: AN EARLY
US EFFORT TO DEMONSTRATE ITS DOMINANCE IN ASIA TO CHINA . (I have read all of Blum’s book-length Anti-Empire
Reports, a powerful inoculation against US anti-communist virus.)

The American Mainstream Media – A
Classic Tale Of Propaganda by William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report, #139, May 23, 2015.

“When an
American warplane accidentally struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 during the Kosovo campaign …”

These words appeared in the Washington Post on
April 24, 2015 as part of a story about US drone warfare and how an American
drone attack in Pakistan in January had accidentally killed two Western aid
workers. The Post felt no need to document the Belgrade
incident, or explain it any further. Almost anyone who follows international
news halfway seriously knows about this famous “accident” of May 7, 1999. The
only problem is that the story is pure propaganda.

Three
people inside the Chinese embassy were killed and Washington apologized
profusely to Beijing, blaming outdated maps among other problems. However, two
well-documented and very convincing reports in The Observer of
London in October and November of that year, based on NATO and US military and
intelligence sources, revealed that the embassy had been purposely targeted
after NATO discovered that it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army
communications. The Chinese were doing this after NATO planes had successfully
silenced the Yugoslav government’s own transmitters. The story of
how the US mainstream media covered up
the real story behind the embassy bombing is absolutely embarrassing.

Over and above the military need, there may have been a political purpose served. China, then as
now, was clearly the principal barrier to US hegemony in Asia, if not
elsewhere. The bombing of the embassy was perhaps Washington’s charming way of
telling Beijing that this is only a small sample of what can happen to you if
you have any ideas of resisting or competing with the American juggernaut.
Since an American bombing campaign over Belgrade was already being carried out,
Washington was able to have a much better than usual “plausible denial” for the
embassy bombing. The opportunity may have been irresistible to American
leaders. The chance might never come again.

All of US/NATO’s other bombing “mistakes” in Yugoslavia were
typically followed by their spokesman telling the world: “We regret the loss of
life.” These same words were used by the IRA in Northern Ireland on a number of
occasions over the years following one of their bombings which appeared to have
struck the wrong target. But their actions were invariably called “terrorist”.

Undoubtedly, the US media will be writing of the “accidental”
American bombing of the Chinese embassy as long as the empire exists and China
does not become a member of NATO.

Panel with Air force
Secretary Heather Wilson and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) at Reagan National Defense
Forum 12-30-17.Subject:US space power, specifically exceeding
Russian and Chinese war-fighting capability and US policy if another country
attacks a US satellite.Rogers is Chair
of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.These are the types of automaton warriors
deciding US and world future far from and unaffected by the needs and desires
of the people of the world.

LETTER FROM BRUCE GAGNON

August 1, 2017[The first two parts discuss
conventional US air war preparation; the third discusses the new THAAD missile
base at Kodiak, Alaska, targeting surrounded China and Russia.–Dick]

Dear Friends,

The last two years I wrote this summer update letter to you from
South Korea. This year I am home in Maine, but in some regards I feel
like I am back in South Korea. The heavy US militarization that so many
around the world feel daily as it impacts their lives is bumping up against us
here these days more than ever.

On August 26 the Navy Blue
Angels
flight team will do an airshow in our local community and I am organizing a
protest to oppose the event. Our slogan will be ‘Real Angels Don’t Drop
Bombs’. These airshows are a recruiting gimmick at a time when the
military is in desperate need for more of our kids to fight in America’s wars
for fossil fuels.

The Blue Angels team burns over 8,000 gallons of fuel in one day
and significantly contributes to global warming. On the one hand
our government encourages us to conserve fuel and protect the environment, and
then sponsors this wasteful and polluting event. (It should be remembered
that the Pentagon has the largest carbon boot print on the Earth.)

We can’t eat the bombs dropped from these F-18 war
planes.
Social and environmental programs are being cut while the Pentagon spends
54% of every discretionary tax dollar on endless war.

In addition, we’ve recently learned that the Navy is preparing for full-scale war games all along the east coast
from Florida to Maine. The Navy intends to fire missiles, rockets, lasers,
grenades and torpedoes, detonate mines and explosive buoys, and use all types
of sonar in a series of live war exercises in inland and offshore waters along
the East Coast.

“The Navy must train the way we fight,” says a promotional video for what is
called "Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Phase III."

The dates and exact locations of the live weapon and sonar
exercises are secret. In all, 2.6 million square miles of land and sea along
the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico will be part of the aerial and underwater
weapons firing.

I mention these two events because they remind me so much about
what is happening in South
Korea and Okinawa where the Pentagon’s military operations are expanding so much
that it must have more land and more off-shore areas, to ‘fight’ its war
exercises.

In South Korea and Okinawa people for years have been daily
protesting US military operations. They’ve been dragged away from newly
constructed bases that will service the US Navy, Marines, Army and Air Forces.
They’ve been jailed and beaten. But they keep going back – day
after day. Many of the people who are doing these protests are older
women. Simple farmers and fishing people who see their culture and life being
taken from them by these aggressive US military activities in their
communities.

I often wonder what it would take for Americans to react in
similar ways. What would it take for Americans to protest every single
day for 10 years straight? Could we ever be so moved and alarmed to take
a stand like the people I’ve had the great honor to meet in recent years?

I’d like to share one more story about a place in America that is
being heavily militarized against the local people’s will. It’s Kodiak Island, Alaska.

Some years ago I visited Kodiak Island on a speaking trip at the
invitation of local peace activists. The mayor of their village came to
my talk as the entire community was in an uproar over the plan to build a space
launch facility on Kodiak. Kodiak is famous for bears and salmon fishing
and a pristine public beach area called Narrow Cape. The space launch
facility was built at Narrow Cape and today the facility is undergoing a huge
expansion.

Israel plans to test its Arrow anti-ballistic missile interceptor from
pristine Kodiak Island. Admiral James Syring, director of the US
Missile Defense Agency (MDA) recently told a congressional committee that the US is Israel’s
partner in developing that country’s missile defense system. “Israel has
significant range constraints within the Mediterranean. And one of the better
places to test is in Alaska, from Kodiak,” Syring said. The work would be
a component of the $80 million contract between MDA and the Alaska Aerospace
Corporation.

Also
under that umbrella contract, MDA plans to launch THAAD missiles from Kodiak Island in the coming months. The testing of THAAD –
Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense program – will include a series of launches. The launch
facility at Narrow
Cape has been bulldozed and gravel pads have been put down in preparation for
THAAD tests. The MDA said there could be up to 300 military and aerospace
workers brought to Narrow Cape. Narrow Cape as a favorite public recreation
area might now be a thing of the past.

The
THAAD ‘missile defense’ system has been deployed by the Pentagon in Guam and
just months ago in a melon farming community called Seongju, South Korea.
Protests there have been happening day and night for the last year as the
citizens, again mostly elders, are doing everything they can to reject THAAD.
They don’t want the newly constructed US Army base there, they don’t want
THAAD there, they don’t want to become a target if war starts with Russia and China (since that is who THAAD
would be used against) – the people just want to be left alone. Like
Okinawans they have experienced war and don’t want their children and
grandchildren to have to go through such a horrid experience.

Some
people speculate that Americans have become spoiled because we make war on
others but have not ever had our entire nation devastated by war. The
Russians (who the US media and both political parties love to demonize) lost 27
million citizens when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during WW II. That
is why they get nervous today as NATO expands up to the Russian borders, and
the US deploys ‘missile defense’ systems in Romania and Poland and on Navy
Aegis destroyers in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic seas.

[Bruce with a personal note.I use his first name because he visited OMNI for 2 days soon after OMNI
began, speaking a UAF and other locations.I hope you will send him a contribution, and to OMNI.--Dick]

As
an organizer I spend my time trying to educate the public about what our
country is doing around the world. I try to get people to react, to join
protests, to write letters to the local papers, and to go to places like South
Korea and Okinawa to see for themselves what the US military is doing there.
But in all my years as an organizer I can’t think of a time when it has
been so hard to turn people out as it is today. At the same time it seems
to me that we are living in the most dangerous time of my life.

I
turned 65 just a few weeks ago. Some folks retire at my age. I
won’t. I will keep organizing and protesting as long as I can. I
will continue to speak out in solidarity with those around the world who are
trying to lift the US military boot off their necks. I will continue to
sit in the streets or step over a ‘forbidden line’ and risk arrest if it helps
bring some sanity to our world and helps even just a little bit to protect the
future generations.

If
you feel the work of the Global Network is still important then please help us
continue our efforts for peace on Earth and in space. We are trying hard
but we can’t do it alone.

U.S. Strategic
Command reports to Congress on the underground tunnel network in China
with respect to the capability of the United States to use conventional
and nuclear forces to neutralize such tunnels and what is stored within
such tunnels (Public Law 112-239,
Sec. 1045).

The 2014 Global Network space organizing conference will be
held near Vandenberg AFB, California
on March 14-16. We will meet at the La Casa de Maria Retreat and ConferenceCenter
in Santa Barbara.
On Friday,March 14we’ll organize a 4:00 pmvigil at the front gate of
Vandenbergand on the evening
ofMarch 15we will hold apublic eventat Trinity Episcopal Churchin Santa Barbara.

We will have limited sleeping space (dormitory style)
available at the La Casa de Maria Retreat center so reservations will be
necessary. (Other hotel information will be available if you would prefer
those arrangements.) We will provide meals for those staying at the
conference center. A sliding scale charge will run from $50-$150 (pay
what you can best afford.)

There will be no charge for the Saturday, March 15 public
event that will be held at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara. More details will
follow.

Events will conclude on March 16 after lunch.

Please sign me up for a sleeping space at the retreat center
on March 14 & 15. Enclosed is _________ (Pay what you can best afford
between $50-$150) Meals are included.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
~Henry David Thoreau

Pax Americana Now Online

The excellent documentary film Pax Americana & the Weaponization of

Space can now be
watched on Youtube. Just go to YouTube and type in the film

name and it should come up for viewing. The film, created by
Dennis Delestrac,

has been widely seen incanada and throughout
Europe on public TV. Theaters in Spain and latin America
showed it as well. Delestrac was never able to sign a distribution deal to show
the film in the US
so it is largely unknown to American audiences. We highly recommend you show it
in your community.Space Alert! I (Dec. 2012).

[Note
for TomDispatch Readers:As
many of you know, without theNation Institute, a
no-name listserv would never have become TomDispatch -- and that splendid
outfit has supported this site ever since. Let me recommend one thing in
return: each year the Institute holds a gala dinner to raise much-needed funds
to keep its programs operating. (And what programs they are! Naomi
Klein, Jonathan Schell, Chris Hedges, and TD’s Nick Turse are all fellows.
The Institute also sponsors an importantfund for investigative journalismand houses theNation Booksimprint, among other
things.) If you have the money, please consider buying a ticket to their
dinner as a way to help them byclicking here.
It’s a blast of an event. This year speakers include Senator Bernie Sanders,
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, and the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel,
and it’s being MC'd by Chris Hayes. While you’re at it, check outmy recent
interviewwith
Bill Moyers. That way you’ll recognize me and can come by and say hi that
night. I always attend. Tom]

In the
1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged
“into the shadows” as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought
between the planet's two superpowers. No one caught this mood better than John
le Carré in hisfamed Smiley novelswhich offered a riveting portrait of
Soviet, British, and American spies locked in mortal combat, yet with more in
common with each other than with either of their aboveground societies.
So many decades later, with the Soviet Union long gone, it’s strange to
discover that, in the case of the United States at least, those
“shadows” have only lengthened. Increasingly, as the Iraq War fades into
history (and out of memory) and the Afghan War winds down, the American way of
war itself is being drawn into those shadows.

Admittedly,
since World War II, control over war -- who to fight, when to wage it, and how
to fight it -- has been on a migratory path into the White House and the
national security bureaucracy, leaving Congress and the American people out in
the cold. In the last decade, however, a
high-tech, privatized, covert version of war has become presidential property,
fought at the White House’s behest by robots,warrior corporations,
and two presidentially controlled “private” forces (a paramilitarized CIA and
theJoint Special Operations Command).
With this transformation has gone a series of decisions that have plunged
American-style war ever further into darkness. In the last few years, for
instance, two presidents, enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy and without the
knowledge of the American people or possibly much of Congress, deployed the
latest in experimental weaponry -- weapons that could someday unravel our world
-- in thefirst cyberwar in history.
Theywieldedwhat someday will undoubtedly be
reclassified as weapons of mass destructionagainst Iran, paving the
way for future global cyberwars which could devastate this country.

In the
same years, the same two presidents took control of another new form of
conflict, drone warfare.
Across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa,
they launched massive, high-tech campaigns
of assassination (“targeted killings”) that may have no equivalent in
history. These have involvedhundreds of air strikesand thousands of casualties.
Enfolded in secrecy, a complex, increasingly codified panoply of national
security processes (including “terror Tuesday” meetings to decide just who to
kill), the president has turned himself into our firstassassin-in-chief.

As theWashington Postrecently reportedin a three-part series, he has also
overseen a process by whichad
hockilling has morphed into
a codified, bureaucratic, normalized killing
machine deeply embedded in the White House, a “disposal matrix” or “kill list” that will be
handed off to future presidents in a “war” (once known as the Global War on
Terror) with at least “a decade” to go and possibly no end in sight. In a
language that used to be left to Hollywood’s
version of the Mafia, the White House, as judge, jury, and executioner, now
regularly puts out hits around the world, while discussing “the designation of
who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted.”

In onePostpiece focused on CampLemonnier in Djibouti as the key base for presidential war in
Africa, a detail caught my eye. It
seemed to capture the ever-darkening nature of this war-making moment.
Speaking of the hundreds of elite special operations forces there, Craig
Whitlockwrote, “Most of the
commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops
on the base.” Put another way, this new form of warfare is far enough
into the shadows that the names of a major part of the U.S. military,tens of thousandsof elite troops whose command has just
gotten its own “secret targeting center” in Washington15 minutesfrom the White House, can’t even be
known to other U.S. military personnel who work with them.

Imagine,
then, what our world might be like once future techno-versions of presidential
war now being developed come online. What will it mean when, in the third
decade of this century, in pursuit of the same Global War on Terror, drone war
has morphed into a “triple canopy space shield” and “robotic information
system,” as described today in chilling detail by Alfred McCoy,TomDispatch regularand lead author of the new bookEndless Empire: Spain’s
Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline? Imagine when,
from outer space to the spreading Camp Lemonniers of planet Earth, the White
House can make secret war in a myriad of high-tech and robotic ways without
even a nod to you and me. By then, in at least one possible future, our
whole world may lie in those shadows.Tom

Beyond Bayonets and BattleshipsSpace Warfare and
the Future of U.S.
Global Power
ByAlfred W. McCoy

It’s 2025
and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills
the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern
age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed,
knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals
biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced
cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information
system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the
twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s
under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

They are
still operating in another age. “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time
since 1917,”complainedRepublican candidate Mitt Romney
during the last presidential debate.

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot
back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the
nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship,
where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”

Obama
later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was
work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need
in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking
about space.”

Amid all
the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have
a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the
president’s sparse words. Yet for the
past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has
presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation
far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale
weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold
new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly
responsible should U.S.
global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.

While the
technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have
deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power.
It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world
stage with its conquest of the Philippines
in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of
counterinsurgency -- in the Philippines,
Vietnam, and Afghanistan -- the U.S. military has repeatedly been
pushed to the breaking point. It has repeatedly responded by fusing the
nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of
unprecedented power.

That
military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification,
then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam.
Finally, during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the
Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future
triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could
produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion
-- or for future military disaster.

America’s First Information Revolution

This distinctive
U.S.
system of imperial information gathering (and the surveillance and war-making
practices that go with it) traces its origins to some brilliant American
innovations in the management of textual, statistical, and visual data.
Their sum was nothing less than a new information infrastructure with an
unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance.

During two
extraordinary decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex
telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil
Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch
card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of
America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla
resistance that persisted in the Philippines
for a decade after 1898, the U.S.
colonial regime -- unlike European empires with their cultural studies of
“Oriental civilizations” -- used these advanced information technologies to
amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society. In this way, they
forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing
the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and
surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging
American state.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of
U.S. military intelligence”
Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years
before in the Philippines
to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division. He recruited a staff
that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000
citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports
on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic
surveillance apparatus.

A version
of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington established
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the nation’s first worldwide
espionage agency. Among its nine branches, Research & Analysis recruited a
staff of nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000 photographs, a million
maps, and three million file cards, which they deployed in an information
system via “indexing, cross-indexing, and counter-indexing” to answer countless
tactical questions.

Yet by
early 1944, the OSS
found itself, in the words of historian Robin Winks, “drowning under the flow
of information.” Many of the materials it had so carefully collected were
left to molder in storage, unread and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global
reach, this first U.S.
information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed
under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove
so crucial for America’s
exercise of global dominion after World War II.

Computerizing
Vietnam

Under the
pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam,
those running the U.S.
information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a
second American information regime. Powered by the most advanced IBM
mainframe computers, the U.S.
military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and
filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant
reels of bar-coded film. At the same time, the CIA collated and
computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of
its infamous Phoenix Program. This, in turn, became the basis for its
systematic tortures and 41,000 “extra-judicial executions” (which, based on
disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence,
killed many but failed to capture more than a handfull of top communist
cadres).

Most ambitiously, the
U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic,
thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi
Minh Trail undera heavy
jungle canopy. The information these provided was then gathered on
computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000
North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected
with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in
1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an
“electronic battlefield” an unqualified failure.

In this
pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also
accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to
significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone. By war’s end,
it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make
3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China,
North Vietnam, and Laos.
By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying
2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image.

On
balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American
“pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of
Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully
destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort. Despite a dismal succession of
short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power,
all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its
advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began
creating a third -- robotic -- information regime.

The
Global War on Terror

As it
found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex
societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new
technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare
-- all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far
more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before.

After six
years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the
power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the
country’s sprawling cities. It thenbuilta biometric database with more than a
million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S.
patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access
instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.

When
President Obama took office and launched his“surge,”escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a
new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as
for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush
administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone
warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.

Launched
as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone
was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation
Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter
killer” capabilities, washeavily armedwith missiles and bombs as well as
sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back
to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development,
between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehiclesrosefrom just 71 hours to 250,000
hours.

By 2009,
the Air Force and the CIA were alreadydeployinga
drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Pakistan
-- and it’s only grown since. These collected and transmitted 16,000
hours of video daily, and from 2006-2012 fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles
that killedan estimated 2,600supposed insurgents inside Pakistan’s
tribal areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones might seem stunningly
sophisticated, one defense analyst hascalled them“very
much Model T Fords.” Beyond the battlefield, there are now some 7,000 drones in
the U.S.
armada of unmanned aircraft,including800 larger missile-firing drones. By
funding its own fleet of 35 drones and borrowing others from the Air Force, the
CIA has moved beyond passive intelligence collection to build a permanent
robotic paramilitary capacity.

In the
same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally,
online. Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the
development of acyberwarfare capabilityat home and abroad. Starting in 2002,
President George W. Bushillegallyauthorizedthe National Security Agency to scan
countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret “Pinwale”
database. Similarly, the FBIstartedan Investigative Data Warehouse that,
by 2009, held a billion individual records.

Under
Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an
offensive “cyberwarfare” capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran
in history’s first significant cyberwar. In 2009, the Pentagon formedU.S. Cyber Command(CYBERCOM), with headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and
a cyberwarfare center at Lackland Air Base in Texas,staffedby
7,000 Air Force employees. Two years later, itdeclaredcyberspace an “operational domain”
like air, land, or sea, and began putting its energy into developing a cadre of
cyber-warriors capable of launching offensive operations, such as avariety of attackson the computerized centrifuges in
Iran’s nuclear facilities andMiddle Eastern bankshandling
Iranian money.

A
Robotic Information Regime

As with
the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the
catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace,
biometrics, and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power.
In 2012, after years of ground warfare in both countries and the continuousexpansionof the Pentagon budget, the Obama
administrationannounceda leaner future defense
strategy. It included a 14% cut in future infantry strength to be
compensated for by an increased emphasis on investments in the dominions of
outer space and cyberspace, particularly in what the administration calls
“critical space-based capabilities.”

By 2020,
this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space,
cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for -- so the claims go --
the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both
space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely
beyond international law. And Washington
hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new
forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War
American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.

As Washington seeks to
surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is
national sovereignty? Absent any international agreement about the vertical
extent of sovereign airspace (since a conference on international air law,
convened in Paris
in 1910, failed), some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you
can enforce it. And Washington hasfilled this legal voidwith a secret executive matrix --
operated by the CIA and the clandestine Special Operations Command -- that
assigns names arbitrarily, without any judicial oversight, to a classified
“kill list” that means silent, sudden death from the sky for terror suspects
across the Muslim world.

Although U.S.
plans for space warfare remain highly classified, it is possible to assemble
the pieces of this aerospace puzzle by trolling the Pentagon’s websites, and
finding many of the key components in technical descriptions at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes
to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space
shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with
agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored
through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls.

At the
lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking distance of
Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99
Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling
all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications,
efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventuallyTriple Terminator missilesto destroy targets below. By late
2011, the Air Force and the CIA had alreadyringedthe Eurasian land mass with a network
of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing
air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

The
sophistication of the technology at this level wasexposedin December 2011 when one of the CIA’s
RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran.
Revealed was a bat-winged drone equipped with radar-evading stealth capacity,
active electronically scanned array radar, andadvanced optics“that allow operators to positively
identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.”

If things
go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles
unmanned aircraft such asthe “Vulture,”with solar panels covering its massive
400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five
years at a time with sensors for “unblinking” surveillance, and possibly
missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology,
NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan,reachedan
altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor
the “Helios” flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles
higher than any previous aircraft.

For the
next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force
arecollaboratingin the development of the Falcon
Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is
expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical
miles from the continental United
States in less than two hours.” Although the
first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they didreachan amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22
times the speed of sound, andsent back“unique
data” that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems.

At the
outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare
dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietlylaunchedthe X-37B space drone, an unmanned
craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time
its second prototypelandedat
Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15-month flight, this classified
missionrepresenteda successful test of “robotically
controlled reusable spacecraft” and established the viability of unmanned space
drones in the exosphere.

At this
apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will
soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that
became obvious in 2007 when China
used a ground-to-air missile toshoot downone of its own satellites. In
response, the Pentagon is nowdevelopingthe
F-6 satellite system that will “decompose a large monolithic spacecraft into a
group of wirelessly linked elements, or nodes [that increases] resistance to...
a bad part breaking or an adversary attacking.” And keep in mind that the X-37B
has a capacious cargo bay to carry missiles or future laser weaponry to knock
out enemy satellites -- in other words, the potential capability to cripple the
communications of a future military rival like China, which will have its own
global satellite system operational by 2020.

Ultimately,
the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of
the U.S.
military to integrate its array of global aerospace weaponry into a robotic
command structure that would be capable of coordinating operations across all
combat domains: space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and land. To manage the surging
torrent of information within this delicately balanced triple canopy, the
system would, in the end, have to become self-maintaining through “robotic
manipulator technologies,” such as the Pentagon’sFREND systemthat someday could potentially deliver
fuel, provide repairs, or reposition satellites.

For a new
global optic, DARPA isbuildingthe wide-angle Space Surveillance
Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum
leap in "space surveillance.” The system would allow future space
warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated
before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth
orbit.

Operation
of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA officialexplainedin 2007, "an integrated
collection of space surveillance systems -- an architecture -- that is
leak-proof." Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agencyhad16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget,
and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500
staffers wrapped in electronic security -- all aimed atcoordinatingthe
flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes,
Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes,
and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter -- such a complex techno-system
is unlikely to respect schedules -- this triple canopy should be able to
atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball,
facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela,
or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics,
and naval navigation.

Technological
Dominion or Techno-Disaster?

Peering
into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios
for the continuation of U.S.
global power. If all or much goes according to plan, sometime in the third
decade of this century the Pentagon will complete a comprehensive global
surveillance system for Earth, sky, and space using robotics to coordinate a
veritable flood of data from biometric street-level monitoring, cyber-data
mining, a worldwide network of Space Surveillance Telescopes, and triple canopy
aeronautic patrols. Through agile data management of exceptional power, this
system might allow the United
States a veto of global lethality, an
equalizer for any further loss of economic strength.

However,
as in Vietnam, history
offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. preserving its global hegemony
by militarized technology alone. Even if this robotic information regime could
somehow check China’s growing military power, the U.S. might still have the
same chance of controlling wider geopolitical forces with aerospace technology
as the Third Reich had of winning World War II with its “super weapons” -- V-2
rockets that rained death on London and Messerschmitt Me-262 jets that blasted
allied bombers from Europe’s skies. Complicating the future further, the
illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington
to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam
or Iraq, creating the
possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea.

If the
future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than
long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which
comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of
technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to
perpetuate U.S. global dominion.

“This
lunatic program, dreamt up by Reagan and known by its comic book reality, Star
Wars, will never work.”And “it’s
costing billions of dollars and untold losses of intellectual treasure applied
to meaningless work.”Therefore, “it’s
time to call for a missile ban treaty.”But the US has
blocked repeated attempts by China
and Russia
to draft a treaty to ban weapons in space.-Dick

The Department
of Defense, directed by Congress, is undertaking the completion of Environmental Impact Statements(EIS) for a potential additional
'Ground-based Mid-Course Missile Defense' (GMD) site in the continental United
States. (The other current GMD site is located at FortGreeley in Alaska.) . . . .

There are several types of "missile
defense" systems today. Some are on Navy Aegis destroyers (testing
quite successfully), some are deployed on Army mobile launchers, while the GMD
system is based underground. The GMD system, whose mission is to have an
interceptor missile hit an "enemy" nuclear missile in deep space, has
not had any real success in their testing program - many of the tests have been
scripted to appear successful.

A new
GMD site could cost more than $5 billion to build. Boeing manages the GMD
program while Raytheon and Orbital Sciences Corporation build the interceptors
('kill vehicles') and the rockets.

These "missile
defense" systems are key elements in US first-strike attack planning. Each year the US Space Command runs a
computer war game where China
and Russia
are attacked with hypersonic global strike weapons that attempt to take out
their nuclear capability. After that initial attack China or Russia
would attempt to fire their remaining nuclear forces at the US. It is then that the triad
of US
"missile defense" systems (ship-based, mobile, and GMD) would be used
to pick-off those retaliatory strikes. One should call "missile
defense" the shield that is used after the US
first-strike attack sword lunges into the heart of China
or Russia.
This is what the Pentagon and the Missile Defense Agency are now developing.

Maine
State Rep. Andrea Boland (Sanford) told me last week that North Korea, Iran
and Russia are eager to
attack the US.
The liberal Democrat wants this GMD base in our state. Better us, she
told me, than someone else. I don't see it that way. The aerospace
industry in Maine
wishes to expand their operations across the state....this GMD site appears to
be their major effort to make a big splash.

Now is the time for public outcry against this East coast GMD
site. Activists in Maine, Ohio, Michigan and New York must speak out against the madness of US
first-strike attack planning and the colossal waste of our$$$$$at a time of austerity cuts in social spending.

In the end "missile defense"
is destabilizing as it forces China
and Russia
to make counter-moves that are then used by the Pentagon to justify even more
of these kind of programs. New arms races are fueled by deployment of
so-called "missile defense". It truly should be called missile offense.